


Calling Down the Thunder

by Eoraptor



Category: Kim Possible (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, Oneshot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-11-06 17:42:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17944214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eoraptor/pseuds/Eoraptor
Summary: Taking a master-course in basic physics at the school of hard knocks.





	Calling Down the Thunder

**Author's Note:**

> Rated E for everyone. Kim Possible and related characters property of The Walt Disney Company 2002-2007, 20019. This is a not for profit work and I claim no rights except the concept.

“You’re spent, fraulein.” The diminutive Austrian smirked triumphantly, watching Shego pant as green flames licked weakly at her fingertips. “You don’t have enough energy in you to light ein kerze. Und your little girlfriend ist busy with mien uberdachshunds.”

 

The villainess growled at the misguided insinuation and shot a glance at her own fingers. He was right, for all his posturing. Her reserves were exhausted. She looked on, feeling an emotion she had only felt once before, when she had raced to the Middleton Space Center only to find Kim Possible already taken by unstoppable aliens; _hopelessness_.

 

Before her rose a massive robot. It looked like a Lil’ Diablo on steroids, standing three stories tall. Which was essentially what it was, a stolen and improved design modified with Lorwardian technology, the “großer Teufel.”

 

Something niggled at the back of her brain as she looked up for divine inspiration. …power… she needed Power… Of Course!

 

“Oh God… This is going to suck.” She muttered to herself morosely.

 

Straightening her stance, dropping the martial guard and standing erect before Dementor and his robot, she summoned up her ego, “You’re wrong, Dorkmental… I have all the power I need to toast this little toaster of yours.”

 

“Vhat are you babbling about? My machines tell me you are spent, tapped, leeren.” The diminutive supervillain sneered.

 

“Ahahah…” Shego tisked, wagging a finger, “I didn’t say it was my power… I just said I had it.”

 

Dementor, sensing something was going on that he wasn’t quite grasping, looked askance at the green woman, “And what power ist das? The sun is down, there ist no wind, and you are standing in the middle of ein grass field, so no electricity.”

 

Smirking, and trying not to wince, Shego held one finger aloft, pointing directly upwards, “You know… for a Ph.D., You don’t seem to know much about elemental physics. What is the nature of my own power, bucket-head?”

 

“Plasma, ja?” the German tilted his head in confusion, “but what does this have to do with the sky, as you are out of _strom_.”

 

Shego rolled her eyes, not in disgust, but in jest. She needed to keep this twerp talking just a little longer as she worked her ‘magic,’ reaching out with the last dregs of her own engrained power, stretching it out as far as she could possibly send it.

 

“No you twit…” She snorted, whirling her finger in the air, “What is the defining characteristic of plasma as a state of matter?”

 

Infuriated at being talked down to by a lowly henchwoman, Dementor quickly rattled off the answer in a show of irritation, “Plasma is any gas, exzited to the point of disassociating with its electrons, resulting in a cloud of ionized particles at very high temperatures und carrying an... electrical… charge.”

 

The short professor suddenly noticed that Shego’s hair, which previously had been matted down with dirt and sand, was beginning to stand up… stand on end really.

 

“Bingo, Bozo!” Shego grinned viciously, and felt the connection being made between a tendril of ionized particles she had sent thirty-seven miles into the air; and the ionosphere surrounding the Earth.

 

Using the very last erg of her power, she sent a second invisible tendril of plasma towards the giant robot a few yards away.

 

An instant later, the air around them erupted in fury. From the very top of the atmosphere, powered by the dynamo that was the entire planet spinning in space, a lightning bolt ripped through existence and into the stadium.

 

This close to the titanic bolt, there was no low rumble, no snap or fizz… to Dementor’s ears it was like the universe itself cracking in half with a massive bang.

 

Hitting Shego’s hand, the bolt blasted downwards, along her arm, across her chest, and out again at a right angle along the path she had laid out, rocketing forward at one-third the speed of light until it struck Dementor’s super Diablo squarely in the chest.

 

Neither Dementor, nor Kim, who had just entered the stadium, could see anything beyond a blinding white blaze of light.

 

Shego, whose body was accustomed to such things, watched electricity arc off of the robot in all directions as the bolt she had summoned instantly vaporized its way through the chest of the thing.

 

As instantaneously as it hard come, the blast was gone. In its wake, the air practically vibrated with the God-like electrical potential which had just been poured into the stadium.

 

The giant robot still stood; but it was clear to anyone observing that it would never move again. A hole two feet across had been bored into its front, and still glowed orange around the tattered edges. The remainder of the chest was scorched black, and spattered with smaller holes where smoke poured out.

 

The air was acrid smelling; the stink of vaporized metals and ozone hanging in the bowl of the stadium.

 

Dementor was on his back, holding the sides of his helmet and rolling about.

 

Shego knew from personal experience that this close to a lightning strike, especially a superbolt from the top of the atmosphere, his eardrums would be ruptured from the airblast of thunder.

 

He should be so lucky. She could have chosen to fry him instead.

 

“Shego?!” Kim cried from the home team tunnel, “Shego, are you alright?!”

 

The villainess dropped to her knees. Even adapted as she was to channeling plasma and electricity, calling down the magnetic field of the Earth itself was overwhelming. Her heart fluttered in her chest, attempting to reset itself after having the stuff of the Gods blasted right around it.

 

“Yup, that sucked…” She panted. “Glad I don’t have any fillings.”

 

She knew she was probably smoking; much like her body, her costume was designed to take a lot, but not the power of Space and Earth.

 

After a moment, she grasped that Possible was still calling to her. Waving a hand, and realizing that her glove had vanished, she croaked out, “Just peachy, Princess.”

 

“I’ll be there as soon as I can see anything other than a big pink streak in my vision,” the heroine called from her spot, leaning against a concrete wall.

 

“Take your time.” The villainess grumbled, “It’ll be a few minutes before I can move.”

 

She suddenly realized she had missed a prime opportunity to crack off a pun at Dementor about being shocked… but, a more rational part of her reminded herself, no one would have been able to hear it over the thunderbolt.

 

* * *

 

 

“So what was that?” Kim had the taller woman slung over one shoulder, helping her out of the stadium.

 

Shego, in turn, was acting as her eyes, as she could still largely only see a pink streak in her vision. The older woman insisted it would go away, but Kim was not so sure; after all, she remembered what happened when her brothers set off her dad’s magnesium surplus in the back yard, and it hadn’t been this bad.

 

“What was what?” the villainess snorted, leaning more heavily on the redhead than she cared to admit.

 

“Duh… that, what you just did in there,” Kim rolled her damaged eyes, “I didn’t know your powers included that.”

 

“They don’t,” she groaned, trying to make her knees move more than they cared to.

 

The heroine looked askance at Shego, “Uh, so… I just imagined that… whatever it was?”

 

“No,” she grumbled, shifting her weight.

 

“So,” Kim grunted as she took more weight, “It was just a miracle of chaos mathematics or some other Drakken word for really great luck?”

 

Sighing, the evil lieutenant continued to inch along, leaning into the redhead to make sure the shorter woman didn’t bodycheck them into a soda machine.

 

The heroine made a noise under the pressure. She muttered and angled in the way she was guided. “So, it WAS you.”

 

“It’s called Hubris, Possible. Learn it.” She slurred, “You’ll live longer.”

 

Kim jerked up under Shego’s weight, hefting her to a better position, “Seriously, why did you never call down lightning on me? I can think of like a half dozen times you could have cooked me, including the Lil Diablos.”

 

“Because,” She growled, angling the shorter woman towards the main exit and into the parking lot, “it’s not _my_ power.”

 

Away from the bright and reflected light inside the stadium, Kim was rendered more or less blind in the comparative gloom of the parking lot. She stopped her questioning and allowed Shego to guide her to the car parked there, alone in the vast sprawl of asphalt. She suddenly felt very glad that she hadn’t landed it directly in the stadium. Unlike a jumbo jet, her little purple car didn’t contain nearly enough metal to distribute a full-on lightning strike, and probably would have been cooked.

 

Finally the two women arrived at the sleek super-car. Kim helped Shego to the passenger side, and then felt her way around the hood to the driver’s side.

 

It wasn’t that she was utterly bereft of sight, so much that most of her vision was still taken up of the afterglow of pink where she had looked directly at the lightning strike. She could still see around the periphery, if she concentrated; but after just ten minutes of that she was getting a headache from the effort.

 

Sighing, she flopped into the deep form-fitting driver’s seat and pulled the door closed after her against the chill of a pre-dawn morning in Europe. She rubbed at her face, trying to physically wipe away the distortion in her vision.

 

It didn’t help.

 

“How do you feel?” she laid her head back to the headrest of the Sloth. “You’re moving about as slow as that time you had the super-cold.”

 

“Well, you try getting struck by lightning and see how well you feel, Princess…” the villainess muttered darkly, laying languidly in her seat. “I feel like there’s glass in every joint of my body, from my pinky toe to the plates of my skull. And let’s not talk about my heart just now…”

 

“Sounds pleasant. Need a hospital?” the redhead had her eyes closed, trying to rest them.

 

“Nah, I’m made… Well okay, I’m _not_ made of tougher stuff, but at least I have experience.” Shego sighed as she tried to ignore the feeling of ants marching beneath her skin.

 

“Mind sharing it? Seems like we’ll be here for a little bit till one of us is fit to drive.” Kim inclined her head as she tried again to will away the pink burn in her vision even with her eyes closed.

 

After a moment of what could be considered reluctant silence, the villainess relented, “Like I said, it is a lot of hubris. When I was about fifteen, I was still getting a feel for how to use my powers. I know I make it look easy, but slinging ionized particles around without setting yourself on fire or wounding bystanders takes a lot of careful practice.”

 

Bending and twisting in her seat, Shego tried to loosen up her joints as she continued, “One day I was dicking around with some batteries with a school science project. I’d just learned how to get my fingers hot enough to solder, so I was making something… a telegraph I think. Thing was, I forgot to disconnect the battery from the thing when I was making a connection. Bang, arc shot across three of my fingers and nearly up to my elbow.”

 

“Completely drained that big square battery,” She lamented, using her hands now to try to massage her thighs, “And left my hand numb. A little bit of tinkering, and I discovered that I could channel electricity with my plasma; particularly with direct current. Like any teenager with a new toy, I tried to figure out all kinds of uses for it. Eventually I settled on using the voltage to up the damage output on my blasts. Electric outlets, car batteries; eventually I started drawing power out of high tension lines and transformers. Also had to learn a lot about electricity in the process, such as the difference between watts, amps, volts, ergs, cranks, EM noise, etc…”

 

“Cranks aren’t an electrical thing,” Kim interjected, only to be shushed.

 

“I saw it on an automotive battery, ‘cold cranking amps’. Anyways…” the villainess sighed, still working the muscle groups in her legs. “I got cocky. I figured I could summon up whatever amount of power I needed. And this was in the nineties, before everyone carried high test lithium batteries around in their pockets and all that.”

 

She gave a barely audible groan as she paused, coughing a bit. “Sorry, ion channels in the cardiac tissue still a bit iffy… gonna need to eat a whole bunch of bananas to get the potassium channels working again. Ahem. So, like I said, I got too big for my spandex. One night when I was… seventeen? Yeah, seventeen. When I was Seventeen we were on top of Go Peak, fighting Aviarius. Like tonight, I was out of juice after dealing with two whole flocks of his homingbirds.”

 

“Yeah, those things sucked,” the heroine remembered dealing with the electronic hummingbirds two years prior when she’d briefly been gifted with superhuman strength.

 

“Yes, they did. Well, up on Go Peak, I didn’t have ready access to overhead power lines, or battery packs, or idle cars etc.” She lamented, giving up on her spasming muscles, “After a few minutes, I realized there was another source of voltage in the area. About ten miles away was a big old prairie thunderstorm boiling up, clear line of sight to me and everything. Knowing that Aviarius thought I was tapped out, I let him get the drop on me with an early version of that giant robot flamingo of his. At this point it was only about six feet tall.”

 

Kim thought she saw where this was going, but decided to let Shego relate it in her own words.

 

“So I reached out and tapped the thunder cloud. Or I tried to.” She seemed to shiver more at the memory than the tremors still fluttering around her body. “See, I totally miscalculated how much raw voltage is just hangin’ around in your average hate-cloud. Real live lightning bolt shot right at me, full bore. I only just managed to channel it away at the last possible second. Literally. At one third the speed of light, it took less than a second to span ten miles plus horizontally and a few hundred feet vertically.”

 

After a long pause, the villainess punctuated her story, “The lightning bolt blew both me and Aviarius off the mountain, melted his Flamingo of Doom prototype, ruptured his eardrums and scorched the muscles on his back; and stopped my heart for about two minutes. Fortunately the Go Jet had a defibrillator. This was long before there was one in every cop car and locker room.”

 

Turning, Shego looked at her heroic counterpart, “That’s why he is stooped and always yells, He’s half-deaf and the muscles in his neck don’t work right. Fortunately he thinks it was just bad luck to get struck by lightning; not that some punk kid with a minor God complex screwed up.”

 

Kim nodded, taking in the object lesson as it was laid out for her.

 

“I learned a lesson that night about not meddling with forces beyond my control, Pumpkin. I thought that Electricity was just another facet of my powers. I thought that I was a supreme badass who commanded nature itself.” She scowled, as though there was a literal bad taste in her mouth, “Mama Earth educated me that night: That power was never mine to begin with. I was borrowing it from a far more mercurial master who could smite me down any time She wanted to.”

 

“I learned over time how to better control the flow of voltage around and across my body, yeah…” the villainess shrugged stiffly, “But, at the end of the day, it’s a power that is still on loan from a higher authority. And that’s not a loan I want to be around for when the interest comes due. I only did it tonight because it was down to me or that mechanical thing in there. The times you and I have fought where I could have? There was always another way out of the situation. Besides, knowing you, you’d be the one person on Earth who actually _could_ dodge lightning.”

 

She smirked darkly at the mental freeplay of chasing the heroine with lightning only to see her evade something which was faster than its own sound.

 

“It’s also why I only let Drakken work with Death Rays anymore,” She snorted, “When he starts messing around with things like dimensional tunnels or time travel, or even weather machines, it ends in a lot more tears than I care to admit.”

 

The two of them sat silently for a few minutes. Kim tried to digest the story which had just been imparted to her, and Shego tried to will her muscles back under her control.

 

After a time, Shego clicked open her door and got out into the dim pre-dawn of morning with a grin, “Anyway, I think that’s enough sharing for today. Have a safe drive home, Kimmie.”

 

The redhead looked around in surprise. That seemed rather abrupt.

 

And then she realized the true nature of her predicament. “Shego, I can’t see! How am I supposed to fly home?!”

 

“You’re kidding me… this thing doesn’t have an autopilot?” the emerald villainess smacked the roof of the low-slung car.

 

“No, Auto Pilots only work because jets fly on carefully pre-planned routes, in single file, with tons of navigation gear on board.” The redhead groused as she rubbed her face. “All this car can do is hover or fly in a straight line until it encounters an obstacle.”

 

“Eh… oh well, your loss then. Plan better for the future.” Shego tossed her hair with a shrug and turned to walk away with all the dignity she could muster. Then she stopped and looked back over her shoulder, “Incidentally, you’re gonna be miserable for a few days. You’ve got welder’s burn on your corneas from the intense UV pulse of the lightning bolt. In an hour or two it’s gonna start feeling like someone poured a whole cup of sand into each eye, and that’ll keep up for a few days… My advice? Stock up on visine and sleep masks.”

 

“Ugh! Shego!” She complained, clenching her fists, “Can’t you please just help me out here?”

 

“Later Princess.”

 

“Shego? Shego?! Darn it Shego!”

**Author's Note:**

> AN: Yup, it’s another one of Eoraptor’s ‘Kim and Shego have an odd conversation’ type stories! And yes, set in the cartoon, not the new movie. (which I hope you all enjoyed)  
> Just a random brainspark (ha!) about different ways to play around with Shego’s powerful abilities that never seem to get tapped to their fullest in the canon.   
> Reviews = Love and Resharing = Caring


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